"Impossibility" and Epistemology
in the Faith Tradition of Abraham
and Sarah (Genesis 18:1–15)

IT IS THE ARGUMENT of this chapter that Gen. 18:1–15 contains the most radical assertion of "ancestral" faith and that it stands
at the beginning of a theological trajectory that has radical hermeneutical implications both for New Testament theology and for
cridcal theology in the present.1 The narradve, whatever its source
and original funcdon, is now set to serve as an assault upon the
epistemology of Abraham and Sarah and upon die epistemology of

1. I use the word "ancestral" to circumvent the term "patriarchal," which is exces-sively masculine. In fact, in the text we shall study closely, the faith issue concerns
Sarah as much as Abraham. By "ancestral faith," of course, I do not refer to the
faith held by the individual subjects of the narrative but to the claim of that narra-
tive as shaped by a self-conscious theological Tendenz. See Martin Noth, A History ofPentateuchal Traditions (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972), 54–57, 147–56;
Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology (New York: Harper, 1962), 1:165–75; and
idem, "The Form-Critical Problem of the Hexateuch," in The Problem of the Hexa-teuch and Other Essays (see chap. 2, n. 36), 54–63. Norman Gottwald, The Tribes ofYahweh (see chap. 2, n. 28), chap. 13, stands in continuity with that scholarship
but understands the traditioning process to be much more politically self-conscious,
self-interested, and intentional. On the notion of "theological trajectory," see Wal-
ter Brueggemann, "Trajectories in Old Testament Literature and the Sociology of
Ancient Israel," in A Social Reading of the Old Testament (see chap. 5, n. 21), 13–42.
Note especially Odil H. Steck, "Theological Streams of Tradition," in Tradition andTheology in the Old Testament, ed. Douglas A Knight (Philadelphia: Fortress Press,
1979), 183–214. In an unpublished paper, John B. Cobb, "Trajectories and Histori-
cal Routes" (1975), has warned against a static notion of trajectory; that criticism I
judge not pertinent to this discussion.

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